Big Migration Possible?

[rtinker]

Greetings unRAIDers,

 

If have done a little research here and realize that parts of this question may be answered somewhere here, so my apologies if I missed it being answered somewhere where I did not see it...

 

I have an older system running version 4.6, it has two UDMA IDE drives, and 8 SATA 1.0 drives.  I am interested in significantly updating the MoBo and processor so that I can use the system for realtime access to videos; currently it is used for backup storage only.  I would update the unRAID to 6.0 as well.  The chassis is newer than the MoBo and the drives so I want to keep that.  Is it even possible to move all of the drives to a new system without breaking the array?  I wish I had delved into the technical info on unRAID enough to know how it identifies the drives, but I never did.  So I am wondering if this is even possible, and if so, then I am looking for guidelines on how to go about it.  I need to replace the MoBo in the system, with the new MoBo having to have an IDE interface card to replace the two that the current mobo has built in, and then I need to know if I should update the OS before or after the mobo replacement.  If there is a guideline for doing something such as this because it is possible, please link me up!

 

Thank you!

 

[JonathanM]

I would say that yes, you could migrate, but the much better route would be to just use new drives with the new system, and leave the old system intact as a backup until you were happy with the new system. Your current drives are very old now in computer years, and all drives fail, it's just a matter of predicting how long until they do fail. If you don't have backups, the last thing you want to do is disturb the current system until you do have backups. You could build a totally new system with more capacity than you currently have utilizing only 3 new drives.

[dgaschk]

Jonathanm's advise is good and is what I'd do.

 

But to answer your questions.

 

1. You'll need to update the OS first. Newer hardware may not be supported by such an old system. Depending on the size of the flash drive you may need a new one. Replacing the flash drive to now totally automated.

 

2. Find HBA PCI cards for the IDE drives. New MBs do not have IDE connectors.

 

3. Record Disk serial numbers and array positions. In order to recreate the array in the new server.

[rtinker]

Thank you both - some really good information here.

 

The reason I did not want to replace the drives until after the migration is that the chassis, while normally the least expensive part of the PC, is a full size tower chassis with 8 removable drive bays, so I can't build a new system unless I buy another of those chassis, although I *am* tempted to bite the bullet and do that.  Anyway, that was the primary reason for asking about the procedure as I want to stay within the same chassis, do the migration, and then replace/upgrade the drives one at a time where parity can be used to re-construct the data on the drive as I replace them.

 

Yes, I planned on finding a card for the new mobo to provide the IDE connectors, but the serial number to array position was one of those gems I was looking for - thank you much.  So to confirm, it does not matter if I get the order of the drives in their physical interface connection wrong in the new system, as long as they are added in order by serial number to the array?  So I should bring up the array with just the parity drive and then add the data drives one by one? 

 

(Building a new system is looking better and better!)

 

[dgaschk]

Only the parity drive must be assigned as parity. The data drives can be in any order. Physical connections do not matter at all in versions past 4.7. Drives are tracked by serial number and only the serial number of the parity drive is really needed.